You had said that you have changed your business model to be more podcast friendly. So tell me a little bit about that. Yeah, quite unintentionally. Um, and, and that is, um, start with this, right? When the car is in motion, it's so much easier to turn the wheel when you know that the wheel needs to be turned when you're sitting in parked, you're not really going anywhere, it's really hard to get to where you need to get.
Okay. So savings angel, which I launched in January, 2007, um, was an unintentional company. Right. I had a problem. I needed to save money, um, because I was spending way too much money at the grocery store, created a solution for myself. Wow. Maybe this could be a membership type thing. And we ended up becoming a seven figure year company with that. Um, now while I was doing that work, you know, in business was life was good. I started serving in our local community.
So I started doing, um, pro bono mentoring workshops, served on boards, um, for minority owned women owned veteran owned businesses, just doing what I can to give back. And I was talking about how I built everything with zero paid ads. That was a seven figure company with zero paid ads. Um, so obviously people want to know, well, how'd you do that? And I talk about, well, here's how you get the media. It's pretty easy. Um, and let me break it down for you step by step.
Now in the course of that work, where you plant your seeds is not necessarily where you reap your harvest, right? So, um, when you're out there, just doing the good work, don't be surprised if opportunities become presented to you. So that's what led to unintentionally starting up my influence, uh, is people would say, wait a minute, you're pretty smart at this media stuff. Can I just hire you? And I was like, oh, um, well, I guess. And so low and below that.
And, and while we were helping people get tons of media coverage, I had, um, we had developed, we had a problem and my problem was, is that I was getting good. Customers, you know, from showing up at events, speaking at events, you know, spoke for the Tony Robbins organization, spoke that, you know, all the kinds of podcasts and conferences, FinCon, social media, market world, et cetera. Right. And I would get some good business there. Um, mainly from the green room, right?
When I would talk with network with other people or just kind of at the mixers and stuff like that. Um, but. The inbound was up and down. Like we'd have good months. We'd have bad months. I'm like, how can I level that out? And so, um, we, you know, really had the brilliant idea is like, wait a minute, let's take this podcast we're doing the thoughtful entrepreneur.
And why don't we just open up the flood gates and say, listen, if you are doing six figures in business, come on in, I'd love to interview you, um, with the intention that I'm going to cultivate a relationship with this person and we'll see where it goes. Maybe we end up doing business together. Maybe something else, right? But I believe, you know, Michael, Michael Gerber, E-myth, right? For as business owners, we are charged with growing the business. That's our number one job.
And so, um, I believe that the best activity that we could be doing is to, um, is to, is networking in that high level networking just leads to amazing stuff, collaborations, joint ventures, strategic alliances, you know, pro cross promotional opportunities, client work, right? So, um, so yeah, that's what we did is we opened up the flood gates. Now it was an investment of effort for sure. And we didn't know if it was going to work out. Well, it did.
So what we find is between 10 and 30% of people that I interview, I end up doing business with in some way. Sometimes I'm hiring them. Sometimes, you know, they're, I'm, they're hiring me, right? To, to, to help solve a problem. So I believe Ashley, if we're just talking about revenue, profit center, potential profit centers, this is going to blow anyone who's in the podcasting world, it's going to blow your mind. And I've taught on this a lot over the years.
I believe that most podcasters are tripping over big stacks of cash to pick up pennies, to try to get value from your audience and get an audience member to quote unquote, buy your stuff. That's a lot. That is a grind. It's, it's just realistically, if we think about your own behavior, um, as a podcast consumer, don't really, we really don't do much where most podcast listeners, some people are not going to like me saying this, but most podcast listeners are pretty passive, right?
Um, now that said, they're building relationship for sure. So, um, but what I, you know, what we discovered is that, uh, if I can cultivate a relationship with whomever I want, why not, um,